We stopped that night at Abu Malih, a small densely built village of the Sudan tribe, on both high banks of a narrow, road-wide watercourse. We were still some ten miles north of the edge of the permanent marsh, and cultivating country stretched out beyond the confines of the villages, most of it still bare and arid-looking, for the water had not yet come. The village was noisy, noisier than any of the marsh villages, where the houses are less closely clustered; to the usual thunder of the dogs and the hoarse cries of their owners was added the cackling and trumpeting of a great number of domestic geese. One of the first things I noticed after we had scrambled up the steep canal bank into the waiting swarm of villagers was a brood of young chickens two or three days old. They were round as puffballs, and every one, from head to toe, was a brilliant aniline green. They looked very fabulous, and their dun-coloured hen fussed over them as though conscious of the rarity and importance of her charges. At first I thought this pleasing folly the work of a child, and was reminded momentarily of a revolting purple Pekinese that I had once seen languish into Claridge’s at the heels of a startling Parisienne. As I looked up from these ridiculous pieces of Disney animation, however, I found myself staring into the soft moon faces of a row of young calves. They were tied halter to halter, so that the slack loops of rope draped evenly and stylistically between their heads, and at the forehead of each, where there should have been a splash of white, flared a vivid patch of magenta. Beyond them stood a heifer with a magenta udder and green teats. It was the time of the New Year by the Persian calendar, and these were potent charms against the Evil Eye.
This Evil Eye is not, as far as I could understand, a personal thing, lying in the power of an evil individual, but in a general sense the eye of evil and harm, the regard of malign powers. The brightly coloured animals appear an anomaly, however, for among the people themselves one infers that it must be the uninteresting, the insignificant or ugly, that escapes the attention of evil powers. Thus a child who is the successor to several who have died is often called by the name of something unpleasant or trivial, so that attention may be diverted from him, and the family escape further victimisation. Extreme names of this type are those of the most unclean objects that exist; parents in a panic through infant mortality may condemn their child to carry for ever the name “Pig”, or “Dog”, “Jackal”, or even “Shit”. Less extreme, and with the desire for anonymity among a host of similar insignificant objects, are such names as “Plate”, “Date” and “Coffee-cup”. I was surprised at the audacity of naming a boy Habib, which means Beloved, until I learnt that he was the youngest of five living brothers.
I learn that the Chinese use somewhat the same means of diverting malign attention from their children, giving to the boys female names and dressing them in girls’ clothes to deceive the evil spirits.
Personal charms, what the Italians call “porta fortuna” and English Catholics call medals, are of great importance to all the tribesmen, as seems general among many superstitious peoples, but they are used most particularly in childhood and in sickness. Sometimes a family may have quite a collection of these objects tucked away in the wooden chest that holds all their intimate belongings; occasionally there are enough for every member of the family to wear one in the case of a local epidemic. They vary a good deal in type. Wandering Sayids, parasitic as only holy men can be, play upon their supposed status as descendants of the Prophet to sell to the villagers charms against illness, which, if the Sayid concerned is literate, may be a crudely written verse from the Qu’ran, or, if he is illiterate, a few meaningless squiggles that the tribesmen will hold in pathetic respect and awe. Occasionally one sees relics of what may be an earlier magic. At Bumugeraifat, in the Central Marshes, a boy with a low fever carried as a pendant round his neck a pierced round stone the size of a dove’s egg, dark, heavy, and very highly polished. Now there is no stone in the marshes, nor for a long way outside them, and by the appearance of this object it was of considerable antiquity in its present form. Thesiger was not with me that day, and my Arabic vocabulary was very small, but I managed to ask where it had come from and to understand that it had been dug up below one of the houses of the village. It seemed to me that it might be very old indeed, and that it might, too, throw some light on the remote and uncertain origins of the people, for the stone was unusual and its nearest locale should not be difficult to establish. I tried to buy it from the boy’s mother, and when she refused I thought she was bargaining. At length she turned down an offer that left me in no doubt that she was not, the fus simply was not for sale; and that, among so poor a people, where practically every material object has its surprisingly low price, was striking evidence of its significance in their eyes. I had seen another, of a bluer, more slaty stone, tied with some other charms into the greasy ends of a woman’s headcloth, the domineering yet whiny matriarch of the mudhif at Dibin where Sheikh Jabir had war-danced while the eagle owl blinked in the friendly gloom within. She had offered, characteristically, to exchange it for the gold-and-enamel Persian charm that I wore myself, but here my scientific curiosity had become confused by superstitions and sentiments of my own.
It was not until I finally returned to Basra that I acquired one of these stones. I was crossing the wooden bridge to the suq when I noticed an old beggar squatting at the corner of the bridge and the canal bank. He was very ragged; he wore the rough woollen bisht of a tribesman, and apparently no dish-dasha below it, for where it was torn his naked skin showed through it. The bisht was open at the chest, and on a mat of white hair lay an oval stone stranger than any I had seen before. I made my way back over the bridge to the workshop of a Sabian with whom I had recently dealt, and explained to him what I wanted. He came across the street with me and from a discreet distance I indicated the stone. He shook his head. “He not sell,” he said, and added an Arabic sentence that was too complicated for me. He saw that I did not understand, and tried again, in English. “From before … from very very before … kulish, kulish, strong holy, no sell. Finish.” “Try,” I said, “and also ask from where it comes. I will wait for you in the shop.” He came back after a few minutes, rubbing the stone on the palm of his hand. “Four dinar,” he said, “I take one—five, yes? He Ma’dan from other side Qurna. Fus—from his father.”
I wondered how much the beggar had received for his father’s charm, and hoped that it was at least half of the price the Sabian had mentioned. It was not difficult to understand how this stone had acquired a magic status, for it was an unusual and striking object in itself. It seemed like some kind of agate, opaque blue-grey with dark lines in it, and over all one side the distribution of colour formed an almost perfect eye; a blind eye, for the pupil was not defined, and there was a just perceptible milky film over it, as though it was the eye of a dead animal grown cold, the eye of a young calf or a gazelle. As I looked at it there came to me the words of a poem from a different landscape.
“I was the dying animal
Whose cold eye closes on a jagged thorn,
Whose carcass soon is choked with moss,
Whose skull is hidden by the fern.”
How great a part witchcraft and magic play in the life of the people I was unable to discover, nor was Thesiger able to help me. If it is prevalent it would belong to the women’s side of life, and that would be virtually impossible for any man, more especially a white man, to explore thoroughly. The very superstitious nature of the people would incline one to believe that it must play a large part. With this outlook events usually tend to form a circle; minor and major ills are attributed to spells, and this in turn encourages emulation by those who would wish to cast them.
Of our four canoe boys only Sabeti admitted wholeheartedly to belief in all djinns, but at least two of the others were quite plainly giving the response which they considered our own sophistication to demand; and the fourth, who was more prepared to find a natural explanation for unknown phenomena, was found to believe with childlike simplicity in circumcision by angels. T
his is an extraordinarily widespread belief among tribesmen, and is held even by minor sheikhs who have had at least some contact with western science. Our host proudly told us that he himself had been thus circumcised, and swore by Hussein that he had with his own eyes seen boys of three or four years lying still asleep in the morning with the severed foreskin on the pillow beside their heads and blood at the site of the cut. The most obvious explanation for this belief, that of convenience in the avoidance of an unpleasant operation, is not valid, for it is not a lawful circumcision by their custom, and those thus singled out for miraculous surgery must usually have a little more removed by human agency to make their condition acceptable to the community. Even our host admitted that the angels were not conspicuously efficient at this work, though in fact he himself had undergone no further operation. He became irritated at our obvious scepticism about angels with scalpels.
“There are boys here in this very mudhif with us who have been so visited by the angels! Here, Daoud, show them what the angels did!” A boy of about twelve stepped over to us and without embarrassment lifted his dish-dasha. The appearance was at first sight misleading, but was in fact quite obviously within the limits of individual variation.
“See!” cried our host, “if we believe in Allah, whom we cannot see, why should we not believe in this which we can see with our eyes? And where was it lying?”
“On the pillow,” said the boy dutifully. I thought his voice lacked conviction.
“There! So it was also with me. And in your country is there then nothing that you cannot understand?”
Thesiger began a lengthy statement which I could not follow. Presently he stopped and turned to me. “I was telling them about flying saucers,” he said somewhat apologetically.
The company appeared keenly interested; all of them, it appeared, had seen flying saucers. These were quite small, white, and moved very slowly and soundlessly across the sky. Sometimes they would be in sight for twenty minutes or more. They were rather sausage-shaped than saucer-shaped, it emerged from Thesiger’s questioning, and they were by no means rare; perhaps we should see one in the morning. Clearly they were no stranger than many other unexplained phenomena.
In fact we did see one in the morning. Excited cries brought us to the door of the mudhif before we had finished breakfast. Hands were pointing, eyes were shaded. There wasn’t a cloud in the whole sky, and it was still pale blue before the heat of the day. Two sea eagles were twisting and diving upon each other in play far above us; otherwise I could see nothing. Then I saw what the people were pointing at. It was a minute silver vapour-trail from an aircraft flying at stratospheric height. As they had said, it was quite noiseless.
“It is an aircraft,” I said. There were cries of denial and derision. I went back into the mudhif and fetched my field-glasses. Even with a magnification of sixteen the aircraft was only just visible, and was so far away that it seemed to be practically stationary, but it formed a speck of the right shape. I handed the glasses to our host. After a moment he returned them with a slightly disgruntled air. I was not absolutely certain what he said, but I thought it was, “I did not require these things to see what was on the pillow.”
Whether or not they admit it, the great majority of the marshmen are afraid of djinns, and afraid of the darkness that may hide them. A djinn is not, as readers of the better-known Arab fiction might suppose, something that always appears out of a bottle, a malign or beneficent creature of enormous power; it is, in fact, any manifestation of the supernatural, for anything not readily explicable is assumed to be the work of some djinn. The invisible world is peopled with a great multitude of these beings, and though Mahommed is held to have converted the evilly disposed djinns, the great majority of them are still frightening and destructive. They are credited with much greater powers than are “ghosts” in European countries, and are quite often capable of inflicting death. There is one such who is quite generally recognised in the marshes, and held in especial dread. He appears, I think, only at night, and the first that the traveller sees of him is a light, quite small, and by no means unusual or alarming. As the victim draws nearer the light begins to glow more intensely until at last it is huge and blinding and from the centre of it there appears the djinn, a giant negro slave, quite naked, and some fifteen or twenty feet high. Some who have seen the djinn may live to speak of it afterwards, but they are blighted mentally and physically, their limbs withered and their brains deranged. One of our canoe boys said he had seen this light from a distance more than once, but, knowing it for what it was, had gone no nearer. There may perhaps be gases in the marshes that produce a will o’ the wisp or Jack o’ Lantern, but the general acceptance of the giant negro slave must owe its origin to one man’s raving; not, one feels, to a racial guilt conscience.
A few of the rare tumulus islands in the marshes are said to be haunted, and at least one to hold buried treasure guarded by a fearful djinn; but it would seem that it is the darkness of which the marshmen are really frightened, and the whole obscurity of the night rather than any particular places that they tend to people with mischievous spirits.
We left Abu Malih early next morning, through narrow, blind watercourses with high mudbanks. On either side the land beyond the bank stretched away desolate and bare, the dead grey mud of cultivating land where as yet no green showed nor any water lay, but in front of us palm trees showed a mile or so ahead, and soon we turned into a wider channel whose beauty was breathtaking. Again and again I noticed it in the marshes and in the cultivating land around them—how enormously the impact of colour and verdure is heightened by the contrast that has gone before it, so that a single orange homespun blanket spread to dry on the side of a reed house may take on the splendour of an imperial robe, a single green tree hold the glory of a thousand returning springs, the mystery of eternal forests. To no part of the earth can spring bring transfiguration as it does to the flat lands of the Tigris and Euphrates. In the juvenescence of the year came Christ the tiger.
The waterway into which we turned now seemed Eden itself. On either bank grew groves of date palms, and in the spaces between them a riot of blossom spread against a sky of unbroken turquoise. Feathery golden acacia made a lattice work against that blue, the vivid flowers flaring in the slant of a sun that was not yet high, and low over the water that reflected the sky with the sheen of enamel trailed weeping trees, some with a crimson flower and some with a white. It was the simple primary colours stippled upon the background of green growth that made the perfection; yet in the transient flash of wings were added wilder and more gorgeous hues. Across the water flickered the halcyon kingfishers, electric blue and chestnut and red, and from palm to palm in undulating flight flew rollers of unbelievable splendour, a flutter of pale blue and purple. Overhead, in the empty patch of sky above the water, a single flamingo flew southward, the sun catching the sheet of blood-colour under his wings.
Even the canoe boys seemed not quite unmoved; Sabeti leaned forward and touched me on the shoulder between strokes of the paddle.
“Zayn hinna, Gavin?”
“Na’am, kulish zayn.” It was simple to have a limited vocabulary; I did not have to try to put my confused thoughts into words.
To Thesiger I said idly: “I should like to build a reed house on that bank and live here.”
“The Iraqi government wouldn’t allow you to.”
No, one could not be allowed to build and live in Eden. One could look and perhaps remember, and in time the memory would lose its brilliance. Others were living in Eden, for there were scattered houses throughout the palm grove, but some were empty and abandoned. Their owners, perhaps, had seen Eden in the nearest oil-well or in the scrubby streets of Amara; for here, far north and outside the permanent marshlands, we were in the periphery of western influence.
The palm groves lasted for perhaps a mile, and then once more we were in open country, though here and there a golden acacia still flowered on the banks, so close to the water that Amara
and Kathia, who were towing the canoe, had to stop and pass the rope round the water side of each. In an open space upon the bank, where no shrubs grew, we came upon a small herd of dun-coloured cattle, herded by two small girls in vivid cotton dresses. Every cow had her udder painted magenta, but one at the water’s edge had been singled out for particular attention, for the most intimate part of her anatomy was dyed a gaudy cobalt blue. In close attendance upon her, and a little apart from the others, was the bull; his entire external sexual apparatus had been dyed to match. The cow wandered away from the herd and the bull snuffled after her; apart from the bright patch of colour on each they were dun-coloured against a dun landscape. The effect was more than grotesque, for their outlines merged into their neutral background, leaving only the blue portions substantial and significant, as bones show on a skeletal X-ray photograph; disembodied sexual organs out for a courting stroll on a fine spring morning. Thus must Adam and Eve have seemed to each other in the first awful moment after they had eaten of the fruit.
It conjured up great possibilities in my mind, this painting of whatever part of the body was of the greatest significance at the moment. It would be de rigueur for guests at a banquet to come with blue mouths and hands; for the speaker at a lecture to have a blue mouth and his audience blue ears. Visitors to art gallery or theatre would have blue eyelids; every dowager as she bent to sniff a blossom at the Chelsea Flower Show would have a blue nose. … And yet on reflection it was frightening to think how many people and for how much of the time would look just like the bull and the cow.
Two hours later we turned into the Chahala, a broad placid river with a fringe of palms and reed houses at both banks, and spent the night at the stone fort of Sheikh Sadam. With two or three other sheikhs’ homes I remember this place as unusual in that it was possible to stretch one’s legs and walk, even wander for a short distance, molested neither by dogs nor by crowds. Between the fort and the river was a big grassy stretch, almost a lawn, where one could stroll in company with a scruffy-looking tame Sacred Ibis, and even the towpath of the river itself was deserted and delectable for the greater part of the time.
A Reed Shaken by the Wind Page 19
